Guinea Corn—Did humans not eat it in the 19th-century South?
There are things I wonder about in the written record that survives concerning what was grown and what was eaten in the early South. The absence of any of the African or European foodways for guinea corn. Particularly given their conspicuous presence in the British West Indies.
For centuries in Africa in Europe the poorest people ate millet porridges and cooked bread from the flour made by the seed heads of one of the several grasses that went by the name guinea corn in North America: Pennisetum glaucum,Sorghum vulgare, Sorghum ceranuum, and Sorghum bicolor. [Indeed the referential imprecision about guinea corn was such that at times small cob yellow and red maize went by the name as well.] These tall grasses bore ample seed heads that had for centuries been broken to pieces, hulled and boiled whole in a soup, or ground and made into dense breads or crackers.
Well before the sweet sorghum strains were shipped by Lawrence Wray from Natal, South Africa, to Governor Hammond of South Carolina in the 1850s, grain sorghum and pearl millet had been planted in American fields. It collected several names: drooping sorghum, durra, Indian millet, Egyptian millet, Sudan grass, Tennessee rice, chicken corn, and Guinea corn. The last was the most prevalent. The first probably came on the slave ships in the late seventeenth century as food for the passage. John Lawson reported its establishment as a common crop in Carolina shortly after the turn of the 18th century. In 1825 the S. C. Agricultural Society inaugurated crop rotation experiments in which guinea corn would be alternated with cowpeas after corn crops and plowed into the soil as green manure. It was also polycropped with corn in the later 1820s. More than green manure, its seed heads, leaves and stalks were valued as livestock fodder—food for cattle and hogs. Because a plant might produce over twenty bushy ears of clustered white seeds in red, brown, or sometimes white husks, the plentitude of seed began to be put toward chicken feed. From Nowhere is there mention of the seed being used as millet for human food. But in the 19th-century South there are no recipes, no reports of slave consumption from Huck patches (while many for benne exist), and no mention in any planter discourses on slave feeding regimens.
What is odd is extensive reports exists for its use as human food from other places in -- ads from New York in the 1760s proclaiming millet seed to be “excellent Food in Families, particularly for children” [“To be Sold by Jonas Phillips,” New-York Gazette (February 23, 1867), 4.] In the West Indies, the employment of guinea corn as a provision crop for slaves was widespread; indeed a famous complaint against repeated administration of guinea corn as food survives from Barbados. Ye on other islands it was one among a variety of provision plants and the object of appreciation and desire. The African yearning for Guinea Corn was registered in a Jamaican song recorded in the Columbian Magazine for May 1797:
Guinea corn, I long to see you
Guinea corn, I long to plant you
Guinea corn, I long to mould you
Guinea corn, I long to weed you,
Guinea corn, I long to hoe you
Guinea corn, I long to top you
Guinea corn, I long to cut you
Guinea corn, I long to dry you
Guinea corn, I long to beat you
Guinea corn, I long to thrash you
Guinea corn, I long to parch you
Guinea corn, I long to grind you
Guinea corn I long to turn you
Guinea corn, I long to eat you.
Some island provision schemes dictated the dispensing of a gallon of guinea corn per slave each Sunday. In mainland British America and the United States maize supplied the place of guinea corn as the chief provision grain.
Guinea corn is everywhere in 1800s North American print as fodder and green manure; nowhere as human food—until the Civil War—and then only in prison camps. . Not the sort of association upon which to build a staple grain.
In 1881 J. B. Killebrew of Tennessee wrote, “About twenty five or thirty years ago, it [guinea corn] could be seen on the plantation of almost every farmer in the South. It gave very general satisfaction, and yet it went out as suddenly as it came into popularity. This was due to the cry that it impoverished the land” [“Dhouro Corn, Indian Millet,” Southern Cultivator (October 1881), 373-74.] But this “cry” was groundless. Yet the cultivation of guinea corn was disrupted; sweet sorghum supplanted it in the fields, offering forage, seed, and sugar. Millo came into fashion too at the end of the century. Seed sorghum/Indian millet remained a feed crop.